Rowan Coleman - Ruby Parker - Soap Star

Nydia is quite an unusual girl. She’s got the loudest voice in our year and the loudest laugh you’ve ever heard, which she says is because she always has to shout to get heard over her four brothers, but I think she’s just got inbuilt “theatrical projection”. Nydia’s family originally came from Nigeria, but Nydia was born in the same hospital as me, only two months later than I was. I was on the fifteenth and she was on the eighteenth. So like we say, apart from the fact she’s black and I’m white, and the fact that we have different parents and everything, we could practically be twins. It feels like we are twins sometimes, because sometimes we just start thinking the same thing at the same time, like a joke or something, and we start laughing for no reason. Then everyone looks at us, but we both know why we’re laughing and it makes us laugh even more. It makes me feel safe and sort of warm inside to have a friend like Nydia. While everything keeps changing, Nydia and me will always be the same, because we’re like twins.

Nydia’s mum and dad aren’t rich like most of the parents of the kids that go to this school. She won her place, beating over four thousand other applicants through the Sylvia Lighthouse scholarship programme, which makes her better than probably anyone else in our year. But that doesn’t stop the other girls picking on her, calling her fat and stupid. Anne-Marie even said no wonder so many people are starving in Africa, because obviously Nydia ate all the food; but she said that in front of Miss Greenstreet and then we got lectured for over an hour about the Third World debt, so she hasn’t made that crack twice. And she’s a moron anyway, because Nydia grew up in Hackney just like I did and has never even been to Africa. But that’s Anne-Marie for you: the brains of a pile of damp pants.

And besides, Nydia is a very good actress, better than any of them. She wants to be a character actress, which Anne-Marie says means an ugly, fat actress, but if you ask me it’s better than being a character less actress like Anne-Marie, because she looks just the same as everyone else: tall, thin and blonde, which means she’s bound to get a part on Hollyoaks. (When the current cast get too old and ugly and get sacked.) But at least they will be old, like twenty-five or something. Not only thirteen, like me.

The thing that happened to me that other girls just dream about? I got famous. Not just a little bit famous like Anne-Marie, whose dad is a film producer and who was once in the EuroDisney advert on TV.

Not just famous because my dad used to be a rock star and my mum was an ex-supermodel, like Jade Caruso’s parents.

Not famous for modelling in the Kay’s Autumn/Winter catalogue like Danny Harvey. (Who looked nice, by the way, even if he didn’t exactly smile. According to Menakshi – who obviously fancies him, as she fancies more or less ALL boys – he thinks he’s too good for everyone else at the academy, even the popular kids. She’s probably right. He used to be quite a laugh, then about a year ago he seemed to change over night.)

Anyway, I am famous in my own right. I’m famous because every year since I was six I’ve appeared in Britain’s most popular serialised soap Kensington Heights. Unless you come from outer space or something you’ll have heard of it. It’s set in the cut-and-thrust world of an auction house and it’s all about very rich, glamorous people buying antiques (and having sex with each other’s husbands, usually). Every year from mid-August to February, Kensington Heights runs once a week at eight o’clock on Wednesdays and I’m in nearly every episode, playing Angel MacFarley.

That’s how I got to be famous and not just in Britain, either. I’m famous in eastern Europe, Pakistan and Japan, and even a bit famous in America. I don’t know this for sure, but Kensington Heights runs on the BBC America channel and I read in Heat magazine the week before last that Brad Pitt watches it and is a big fan! Imagine that! Brad Pitt has seen me on TV! Which is why it’s a shame that Angel MacFarley is about as glamorous as Tesco’s-own trainers. But it’s only to be expected because, of course, I’m not even slightly glamorous. Even last year when I went to the British Soap Awards all the other girls from the show wore backless and strapless dresses and glitter and heels. I had on my black trouser suit and a blue velvet top and no real make-up, just foundation and lip gloss. Mum said I had to look my age. I said, “I don’t want to look my age, I hate my age!” And she said that the only way to get round that was to grow up, which I clearly wasn’t ready to do if I was going to make a fuss about it. Like I said, she’s pretty keen on me being normal – even when being normal makes me look stupid.

Everyone else in the soap is super gorgeous, of course, except my family, the MacFarleys, because we’re what the producers call “social realism”, although Angel’s mum, played by former model Brett Summers, is still pretty attractive – even in an M&S top. And anyhow, I don’t know that it was very realistic when it turned out that Angel’s dad had a long-lost identical twin brother who came back whilst he was away nursing his sick mother and tried to trick Angel’s mum into going to bed with him when normally she’d never cheat, because we are the only family in the soap that doesn’t do stuff like that.

In the end Angel found out about him and stopped it just in time. I got a lot of letters after that episode. You’d be amazed how many kids actually do find out that one of their parents is cheating on the other one (although only two letters concerned actual identical twins). And they get all stressed and upset and don’t know if they should say anything and it’s all horrible. I don’t know why they write to me as if I actually know anything about anything in real life, but I always write back and put in some leaflets and the number for ChildLine and suggest they talk to a teacher if they are worried. The other teenagers on the show get letters from people telling them how much they love them, especially Justin de Souza (who I’m madly in love with, by the way). All I get is people’s problems and that practically says it all, to be honest.

Mum says it’s because I’m famous that the other girls at school aren’t that nice to me. She says it’s because every summer break when I go off to film the next series of Kensington Heights they wish it was them instead. And I say, why would a load of thin, pretty girls, who actually get a holiday all summer long, be jealous of me stuck at the BBC studios filming Kensington Heights ? And she rolls her eyes and tells me I don’t know how lucky I am. I suppose she’s right, because most of the letters I get from other girls tell me more or less the same thing, even if sometimes they don’t realise that Ruby Parker and Angel MacFarley are two different people.

The thing is, you don’t know how lucky you really are until it looks like everything is going to be taken away. I thought it was all right that I was just normal-looking, because my character was normal-looking.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

19 Othello Road

Shakespeare Estate

Birmingham

Dear Angel,

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. I expect you get people writing to you all of the time. I read a bit about you in Girl Talk mag and you said that when the show’s on you get nearly two hundred letters a week! Do you read them all yourself or do you have a helper to do it?

I just wanted to write and tell you that you are exactly like me, we could be sisters. My dad’s not the live-in caretaker of a posh antiques shop, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that you and me are exactly the same. I’m always overhearing people talking about things I shouldn’t and I’m often getting into trouble for saying the wrong thing. Also I have the same duvet cover that you do. Also my mum drinks a lot too just like yours. Sometimes she gets so drunk she falls flat on her face and everyone looks embarrassed. Sometimes it’s not even when there’s a party. Sometimes it’s in the afternoon. I wish had a dad like yours to sort her out (my dad says he’s washed his hands of her) and of course having a rich uncle to pay for a rehabilitation centre must be a help.